black and white
by adryanna's echo
Summary: Rivaille is never black and white, not even on paper, and she wonders why that hurts the most. Rivaille/Petra.


title: black and white  
fandom: shingeki no kyojin/attack on titan  
rating: K+  
summary: Rivaille is never black and white, not even on paper, and she wonders why that hurts the most. Rivaille/Petra.  
warnings: spoilers up to chapter 30  
additional notes: for carmen because she's a freakin' sadist.

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She works away deep into the night, as the candle burns away to a charred stub floating in a pool of slick and the night grows ever darker.

Rivaille passes her on occasion, when he awakes in the middle of the night and patters down to the kitchen for a drink of water. It calms his nerves; they tingle in the darkness, which used to cloak him and now reminds him of what he used to be.

He dreads those nights, because he knows sleeplessness lies ahead as his hearing heightens, every sound fraying his nerves because he needs to protect; he needs to protect his team and the girl with the soft blonde hair who writes late into the night on the vestiges of oil and string.

He doesn't know what she's writing but he never thinks to ask. Her things are hers and his are his, and that's that.

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When Petra sends letters, she sends many at once. They rarely have men to spare, and she has too much to write.

Her team knows and thinks little of her writings, as she sneaks them in during the witching hour, when everyone is supposed to be asleep. When she sends them off they are discrete slips of paper slipped into the occasional reports Commander Irwin can actually be bothered to send.

She never gets to send them herself, of course. They are special operations, and thus obviously cannot be bothered with something so insignificant as simple message delivery.

Sometimes she watches the couriers gallop off with a wistful look on her face. She'd like to see who her letters end up with. After all, she seals them with no signature, in unmarked envelopes. Pure white, the clean she's never been and the clarity she's never had.

She wonders why she writes at all sometimes, if there's no one she wants to read them. But then she traces the pen across the page, black on white, and she understands as she watches her thoughts appear on the page.

She sees and lives in colors, and it is hard and it hurts. But she can write in black and white and most of the time that's enough.

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Some letters do have an address, all to her father. He likes to know how she's doing, how she's feeling. She feels claustrophobic and uneasy writing to him. He wants so much for her and she wants other things, so she regales him with easy tales, happy ones that he wants to hear.

The other letters speak the truth. Death, weakness, and destruction. At least her teammates have long accepted the fact that she is a girl, and yet she is used to such things. But she is also human, and that means that other, much more mundane things, hurt her more. _It is hard to love_, she writes over, and over, and over.

Rivaille is never black and white, not even on paper, and she wonders why that hurts the most.

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He proposes to her while they are having a rare respite in a grassy meadow.

She says _what? _and he laughs at her wide eyes and open mouth.

"Let's get married," are his words, and her smile is her reply.

He's still not black and white, but for once, it's okay to live in color.

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They're about to head off on the mission for Eren and Rivaille pulls her aside, fist closed around something.

He places his finger on her lips and grasps her left hand, slips a cool round band over her fourth finger.

She feels tears in her eyes, and he hugs her close, a chaste kiss atop her head.

He knows what she wants to ask and he hears her voice whispering it in his head, _Why now? _but all he can manage is _please don't die_ and she simply pulls him closer.

For the first time Rivaille wonders how they ended up like this, broken souls in a broken world, but then the horn bellows and they are separated.

They are mere feet apart but he wonders if they'll ever reach each other.

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She is gone and he did not save her.

It burns him at night, when he sleeps fitfully and cries out at the never-ending nightmare that repeats in his mind.

The truth is flames and yet the truth is ice that freezes his heart and makes him unable to shed tears because somewhere up there a vengeful God is finally satisfied, has finally made him pay and he is angry. He screams at the sky sometimes, and Hanji just sits down behind him, because she's the only one who understands him enough to be willing to stay with him and make sure he doesn't hurt himself. He screams anger, and he screams blame, and hurt, and guilt. Pointing fingers never did him any good in the underworld, and he wryly thinks that it's ironic that heaven works that way too.

Every morning he wakes up covered in sweat with a face lingering in his mind and he realizes where the real nightmare lies.

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He sees her father on the inglorious return trek through civilization and he cannot stand to look at him as the man with the blond hair runs up to him and fills his ear with chatter.

Certain words stab him in the heart like knives and his face freezes and his heart burns. The caricature of an alive Petra that her father paints is so incongruous to him he wants to laugh the laughter of a madman, but he can't because it hurts to move, to think, to be.

Marriage. What a sweet thing, unattainable, and ridiculous. The pinnacle and zenith of happiness, but nothing more than a dream, belonging to an utopia, the foil of the world he lives in. Did they really speak of such things? In a broken world, two broken souls, dreaming of perfection.

Hanji gives him a sympathetic glance as the trail of disgrace continues, leaving Petra's father babbling behind. Rivaille thinks he knows already, but it is so terribly soul-crushing, and to an innocent soul like her father denial is far, far sweeter than reality.

He thinks that maybe he'd like a taste of it.

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When Rivaille finally arrives home in his spartan bedroom at the barracks there is a pile of snow white on his desk and he wonders what they are. He is clean like white but he has never had that purity or innocence and it burns him to see.

He rips one open and out spills fluid words across countless pages. Black on white, black and white. He reads the words slowly. _Love is hard, _it says, _but losing him would be harder._

He picks up the rest and dashes them to the ground in a rage, stomping all over them until they are no longer white, but marred with grime and dust and dirt and then he screams for Hanji to clean everything up because he can't stand the filth.

Somewhere there is a vengeful God that is laughing at him.

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_fin._

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**A/N: **rivetra is so sad 8( I have quite a few headcanons for them, so hopefully I'll be writing more of these!


End file.
